“Chronic unforgiveness causes stress. Every time people think of their transgressor, their body responds. By decreasing your unforgiveness it will cut down your health risk. Now, if you can forgive, that can actually strengthen your immune system“. [VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity]
“Forgiveness could boost the immune system by reducing the production of the stress hormone cortisol” [RockefellerUniversity – New York]
“When you hold onto the bitterness for years, it stops you from living your life fully. As it turns out, it wears out your immune system and hurts your heart” [Stanford UniversityCenter for Research in Disease Prevention]
“Those who received forgiveness training showed improvements in the blood flow to their hearts” [University of Wisconsin – Research Dept]
Researchers at the University of Michigan’sInstitute for Social Research found that forgiveness was linked with better self-reported mental and physical health.
new study from DukeUniversityMedicalCenter demonstrates that those who forgive others experience lower levels of chronic pain and less associated psychological problems like anger and depression than those who have not forgiven.
Studies at OhioStatesUniversity found that the highly stressed women had lower levels ofnatural killer cells than women who reported less stress. “Natural killer cells have an extremely important function with regard to cancer because they are capable of detecting and killing cancer cells. Psychological interventions, such as forgiveness, have important roles in reducing stress and improving quality of life, but also in extending survival.” [Barbara Andersen, Professor of Psychology, OhioStateUniversity]
“The program’s preliminary work suggests that forgiveness lowered the stress hormone cortisol that in turn affects the immune system, but only when the patients forgave the ones they blamed”. [University of Maryland – Institute of Human Virology]
“When I suggest emotional healing to people with cancer, they always misunderstand me. They hear it as emotional support. They think I either just want to comfort them, or show them how to have a more positive attitude. They don’t get that something like forgiveness might be the key to their getting well. I see their eyes glaze over when I go on to say that emotional toxicity is most likely the cause of their cancer, and that forgiveness, if used with appropriate treatments and lifestyle changes that address the physical, is a ‘first-line’ primary treatment. Their inability to hear this as a strategy for survival, is a measure of how brainwashed we all are into thinking that treatment for cancer must always be harsh, drastic and violent. With our War-on-Cancer mind-set, it’s hard to imagine that something so seemingly soft and gentle as forgiveness could be the answer to our problem.” [Colin Tipping, Director, Institute of Radical Forgiveness]
“I have collected 57 extremely well documented so-called cancer miracles. At a certain particular moment in time they decided that the anger and the depression were probably not the best way to go, since they had such little time left. And so they went from that to being loving, caring, no longer angry, no longer depressed, and able to talk to the people they loved. These 57 people had the same pattern. They gave up, totally, their anger, and they gave up, totally, their depression, by specifically a decision to do so. And at that point the tumors started to shrink.” [Yale Medical School – Dr Bernie Seigel, Clinical Professor of Surgery]
(https://nuggets4u.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/major-universities-findings-regarding-unforgiveness-and-disease/)